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Thomas A. Parham’s seven-year stint as president of California State University, Dominguez Hills, is coming to an end.

During his tenure, the campus made progress in graduating and retaining students, though it fell short of some goals and remained below the average across Cal State. Dominguez Hills established a place on national college rankings for social mobility and student diversity, though enrollment has declined from roughly 18,000 to 15,000 students since 2020. And while new construction and accreditations on campus are a point of pride for Parham, 71, Dominguez Hills is also among Cal State campuses that have enacted difficult budget cuts in recent years, prompting protests from some students and faculty.

In an interview during his last month leading the university, Parham defended the campus’s achievements. “I don’t have any regret about the job we did, the difference we made, the transformation that we helped engineer on this campus and the lives that we transformed as a result of the work that we put in place,” he said. Dominguez Hills’ performance on measures like graduation rates should be understood in the context of its student body, which includes many first-generation, low-income and historically underrepresented students, Parham said. And he called on California lawmakers to invest more in campuses like his. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your campus, Dominguez Hills, is among the CSUs where enrollment has taken a dip since the pandemic. Why should students go to college?

It’s a good question, because if you look at the downturn in enrollments, there’s no single variable that ever accounts for 100% of the variance of explaining any equation.

One of them is the pipeline in (the Los Angeles Unified School District), which surrounds us, is going down, as are a lot of school districts. People didn’t have as many kids. 

Second is, in a post-Covid reality, people are rethinking, ‘Do I want to invest my time, given how short life is?’ when they got reminded with all the friends and family that they lost. 

If you think about employment, the minimum wage jumped to $20 (for fast food and some other workers) and in some places $25-an-hour. You’re paying a kid $25-an-hour – that’s $50,000 a year at a full-time clip. And someone’s got to think, ‘Why do I need to go to school when I can earn $50,000 doing whatever?’ 

The UCs couldn’t get their international (students) back. So now they’re taking students we used to be able to keep. Now we’re having to compete for students. 

What’s the value to a student? Number one, we educate students that are much more culturally diverse than normal. And I still believe that education, much like Malcolm X said, is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for today.

To me, a university education should never be to get a job. Education, for me, is about the cultivation of the human spirit and the human potential. How do I come to explore and understand what I’m really good at? What are my values? What are my interests? 

CSU has recently unveiled a Student Success Framework to measure the university system’s progress. And that yardstick has to do with things like job placement and your career earnings. Do you feel that that’s appropriate or misguided?

It’s not at all misguided, because it’s one of the things that the public has an appetite for. The public is looking for the (return on investment, or ROI) question. If you’re in a corporation, your ROI is, what’s my return on investment?

Well, we have one of the cheapest games in town. Our biggest cost, in fact, is not even tuition and fees. It’s probably the housing supports — what I would encourage folk to look at. 

But we have the public and our families who look at this as ‘How much is it going to cost me?’ rather than looking at it as ‘What am I prepared to invest in my future?’ Because we know that for a college graduate, their salary differential exponentially is higher across a lifetime, but also the benefits that they get pay off almost immediately in those particular spaces. 

You co-chaired CSU’s Black Student Success Workgroup, which released a host of recommendations in June 2023. Do you feel that the current federal environment (and the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion) has at all caused CSU to stall in these efforts?

We are acutely aware of the federal government’s hostility toward anything that looks like it wants to be diverse. Not a surprise to us, but we try to delicately dance, not to skirt the law, but really to be in tune with the law as it is written, and separate out what is someone’s opinion and perspective about what they like and don’t like, versus technically what is legal. 

For example, they claim, somehow we’re discriminating because we run DEI centers, because we have an affinity center for Black students or women, because we have an LGBT center, or for disabled students, because we have a Latino Center or an Asian-Pacific Islander center.

Well, discrimination assumes — big assumption — that if you are anything other than connected to that affinity group, that you somehow can’t take advantage of that resource. You can be a white student and walk into a Black resource center. You can be a Latino student and male, and walk into a women’s center. You can be a woman and walk into the Male Success Alliance. There’s nothing that we have that restricts anybody’s engagement in that.

If we made any modification at all, it is about the language, because sometimes our language might have been more passive, which is ‘We don’t discriminate,’ as opposed to more active, which is ‘We actually invite others to come, take advantage of what it is that we offer.’

You often quote civil rights leaders and Black intellectuals. You quote Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Carter G. Woodson. Does memorizing those words make them more meaningful to your life’s work?

They become mantras and symbols of possibility. When I see Fannie Lou Hamer talking about — I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired — it sometimes creates the mood and the ambiance that allows me to kind of move forward. When I see Fanon, which is kind of my daily mantra, say that Each generation, out of relative obscurity, must reach out and seek to fulfill its legacy or betray it — I go to work every day and go to bed every night deciding, have I fulfilled or betrayed the legacy that I’ve been blessed to inherit by my ancestors and my elders? 

Do you worry that a student today, living in a world where it’s so easy to Google or to go to ChatGPT, will not build that muscle of having the words from the generations who came before them echoing in their head?

(Martin Luther King, Jr. said) Be careful that the means by which we live does not outpace the ends for which we live. And I always remember that. How prophetic was he to talk about that? And if you look at all the innovations that have happened since then — even in this AI generation and new innovations — we have to be careful that the means by which we live do not outpace the ends for which we live.

And every strategy has a plus and a minus. Life is always the synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. Sometimes your best friend can be your greatest weakness, if it’s used in an inappropriate context, or if the context changes. Our job is to maximize the ability of that new innovative technology to do good and minimize the destructive elements of it that people will use to manipulate and do things that are inappropriate.